The Cloud Child Who Would Not Settle

In the floating sky-city of Cloudholm, where the houses are made of mist and the streets are made of morning fog, there lived a little cloud-child named Nimbi. Nimbi was small and round and white as fresh snow, and she was never, ever still. While the other cloud-children drifted along slowly and calmly at their parents' sides, Nimbi zoomed. She raced from one end of the sky to the other and back again. She spun herself into fluffy loops and tumbled through the air like a puppy chasing its own tail. She darted around the tall misty towers and startled the sleepy sky-birds. She simply could not sit still for even a single moment — and so, when night came at last and it was time for all the clouds to settle, Nimbi did not know how.

"Come and rest now, little one," called her mother, a soft grey rain-cloud with a slow and gentle voice. "The day is done. See how the sky is turning pink and gold? It is time for all clouds to drift low and slow and settle down for the night."

But Nimbi could not. "How do I settle?" she cried, zipping round and round in an anxious little circle. "My edges are all fizzy! My middle keeps buzzing and buzzing! My puffs won't hold still! I don't know how to be quiet — I've never once done it!" And the more she fretted and worried about it, the faster and faster she raced, until she had wound herself up into a small, frantic thundercloud, dark and grumbling and crackling at every corner with tiny sparks.

That was when the old West Wind came drifting by. He was the oldest and gentlest of all the winds in the world, and he had been rocking clouds to sleep since long, long before the mountains were young. He did not tell Nimbi to stop. He did not scold her, or tell her to be still, or say "calm down" — which never once in the history of the sky has helped anybody calm down. Instead he simply began to blow, very, very softly and very, very slowly, all around her.

"You cannot make yourself settle, little cloud," the old wind murmured, curling warmly around her. "No cloud ever can. Settling is not something you do. It is something you let happen. So stop trying for just a moment. Here — lean into me, and let me do the drifting for you."

Nimbi was, by now, far too tired to argue. So she stopped trying to hold all her fizzing edges together, and she leaned, just a little, into the slow warm current of the West Wind. And at once the wind began to carry her, ever so gently, in a long and lazy drift out across the darkening sky.

"There. Do you feel that?" the wind breathed. "You don't have to race anymore. You don't have to hold yourself up — I am holding you. Let your edges go soft. Let your middle go quiet. Let your little sparks fade away. I have you safe, and I always will. I have carried a thousand thousand cloud-children off to sleep before you, and I have never once dropped a single one."

And slowly — because such a thing simply cannot be done in a hurry — Nimbi began to spread out. Her frantic, buzzing edges grew soft and feathery and calm. Her dark grumbling middle went pale and peaceful. Her crackling corners smoothed themselves away. She stopped being a tight, tense little knot of a storm-cloud, and became instead a long, loose, drowsy wisp, stretched thin and soft and golden across the very last light of the day.

"There now," said the West Wind. "That is how a cloud falls asleep. Not by trying hard. By letting go, just a little at a time, until at last you quite forget you were ever holding on at all."

Nimbi drifted. She could feel her mother's soft grey shape resting close beside her, and all the other cloud-children spread thin and peaceful right across the wide evening sky, glowing faintly pink and gold and lilac as the sun slipped quietly away behind the world's edge. She was one of them now — no longer a lonely racing speck, but part of one long, gentle blanket of cloud, laid softly over the whole sleeping world below.

"I settled," she whispered, amazed at herself. "I didn't even know how — and I settled anyway."

"You did indeed," said the West Wind softly. "You always could, right from the start. You only had to stop trying quite so hard, and let the great wide sky hold you."

And there, held by the oldest and gentlest wind of all, and surrounded on every side by her family, the little cloud-child who could never be still at last drifted, and thinned, and softened, and slept — spread out wide and calm and peaceful across the whole quiet evening sky of Cloudholm, until the warm morning sun came climbing up to gather her gently in again.